My friend Greg Kessler, who runs and holds the copyright to the invaluable blog St. Louis Punk Archive and its associated Facebook page, was kind enough to scan what I believe is my first foray into writing about what is loosely called classical music (in this case, though, Baroque opera). I won’t lie: rereading this piece after many years–written by a (very) recent high school graduate–it does make me cringe in a few places. I could probably do a lot better now–I hope so, anyway!–but mostly I am just moved by the knowledge that the punk rock fanzine Jet Lag, to which most of my closest friends regularly contributed, scored comp tickets to this fancy-ass Gluck opera–with set and costume designs by Louise Nevelson (!!!), a BFD that even my callow teenage self recognized as such, well, that is just a delightful snapshot of what St. Louis arts culture was like in the mid-80s: “Hey, we have some extra tickets to this opera; maybe we should offer them to the punk rock fanzine people, why not?” And then my editors probably thought, “oh, why not let the girl who last wrote about The Time and Black Flag cover it?” (I’m kidding. We were all good friends by that point, so they knew I had “facets.”)

I also think it’s cool that I went with my friend Cat Pick, whose name then was Cathy Renner. She has her own Substack now, as does her husband and our Jet Lag editor, the first person to recruit me to write for publication, Steve Pick. I urge you to check out both Substacks. If I could remember how to edit or augment my website’s blogroll, I would, but that’s a project for another day.

Another fun local fact that might make me seem hyperprovincial (or more so, that is): my friend Patty Kofron, whom I quoted most recently in my Verdi Requiem notes, was singing in the chorus for that production I saw. I didn’t know her at the time, and it never occurred to me to think in my first exposure to Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice that 40 years later I’d be friends with someone who was singing that night. Time, the mindfuck revelator!

I suppose I’ll tag this as juvenilia. I’ll add for benefit of younger readers, who don’t remember how regular people published stuff before the Internet, the convention was to underline or capitalize type that would get italicized today. Sometimes we would go in and draw diacritical marks. That’s why I never got too fussy about the acute accent over the second e in my first name. For years I simply didn’t have the option (on my birth certificate, I think someone typed in an apostrophe or something). And the reason this byline has the surname Spencer instead of Saller is that I had not yet married. Although in a strange coincidence that also suggests hyperprovinciality, I did meet my husband a few months later, in a poetry class at Webster University. We did not start dating until the mid-90s, however.